How to: Free up drive space.
From TSG Library of Knowledge
At some point nearly everyone who uses a computer realizes that their hard disk is almost full. Now it may be that technology has so improved during the time taken to fill that drive that twenty times the storage space can be had for a very reasonable amount of money. Spending that money will mean far less work and much faster results on the journey to free drive space, and after a few runs of this process of removing unneeded data it may even be the only available route as there is no more unneeded data to remove. Even so, this process is useful both for extending the life of an individual drive and for ensuring that newly installed replacements do not begin life with a load of unnecessary clutter.
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Remove Temporary Files
Many programs write files to the disk that really should only be stored temporarily. Perhaps it is a program, script or file to be used with a single web page. Perhaps it is a picture thumbnail, built by rescaling the original one time when needed, but never needed again. Perhaps it is a history of what files you opened on a day. Perhaps it is a Virus Vault maintained by your antivirus, filled with such files as you not only don’t need, but don’t want. Or perhaps it is a file constructed by an installer or compression program as an intermediate stage between the starting and finished files. Unfortunately very often these files are not disposed of, and over time can build up to as much as several Gigabytes of wasted space.
Some of these files need to be removed manually, such as Browser caches or Virus Vaults. There are however a number of programs which have also been made to automate removal of some of these temporary files, thus recovering the disk space. This may sound like it is only a temporary measure, but if it took 4 years to collect 2GB temporaries, in 2 years the fairly quick process can still boast a Gigabyte of regained space.
- The Windows Disk Cleanup can be accessed from Start>Programs>Accessories>System tools>Disk Cleanup.
- Clearing the Browser Cache and data can be done from within the browser, in tools>Clear Private Data in Firefox
- Clearing the Browser Cache and data can be done from within the browser, in Tools>Internet Options>General>Browsing History>Delete in Internet Exploring
- Emptying the Virus Vault can be done from your AntiVirus’s User Interface
- CCleaner>Cleaner
Remove your unnecessary files
Removing Temporary Files is all very well, but even a Gigabyte isn’t enough space. Most of the clutter on a drive was put there by the user, in the form of all the documents, pictures, videos, songs, and installed programs. Though most of this was useful at the time, much will have since become obsolete. Removing these files is by far the best way to free drive space. Although due consideration must be granted to copyright, files which might be useful in the future may be moved and stored in other places such as optical disks (CD’s, DVD’s), Internet storage, or in the case of purchased software or multimedia merely left on the original disk. There is quite a lot of software available for analysing your drives to break down which file types or folders are taking the most space. This is useful in choosing which strategies to pursue and which folders to focus on.
Programs
Any programs which you no longer use, particularly trial programs whose trial period has expired, should be removed. It is not enough to delete the shortcuts from the desktop and start menu, nor even to simply delete the program’s executable file. Rather the uninstaller for that program should be run (from the program folder, add or remove programs section of control panel, or Tools>Uninstall from CCleaner.) This should completely undo the installation of that program, including any shortcuts, settings, files, or registry entries that were made at that time. Files which have been moved since installation may need to be manually deleted. Likewise unneeded files such as saved games (the game now having been removed) created through the use of the program may need to be manually deleted.
Program Specific Files
A problem particularly but not exclusively of multimedia editing software, some programs save the final result in a conventional, compressed format. However files saved part way through the editing process are prone to be uncompressed and often will even have unnecessary added data (such as 6 overlaid images in the place of one). Even if the end product is needed, bloated and incomplete pre-stages can probably be safely removed. Search for *.’’file extension’’ to locate all files of that type.
Music, pictures, and videos
These files often consume far larger amounts of disk space than documents even when compressed. Their removal will be critical to recovering significant space on a drive. Since they often function as keepsakes and entertainment you may not wish to simply delete them. Nonetheless if you have such multimedia files with which have not been accessed for a long time, seriously consider whether you can delete them or at least store them on CD or DVD’s. The below section on compression is also relevant to maximizing the amount of information that can be stored on a disk.
Documents
Though often smaller than multimedia, document files are likely to be far more numerous. In general these were made by the user and will represent a great deal of work and so are kept in some obscure folder for “archive purposes.” Even so the purpose of that work is probably complete, and keeping a folder filled with old reports or schoolwork is probably generally useless. Keeping them at full size on the hard drive is a luxury you can ill afford if the hard drive is low on space. Again, delete, move somewhere designed for long-term storage of files (like a CD), or at least compress the documents. See below
Duplicates
Remember one thing: Backups ARE NOT unnecessary files by nature. However there is such a thing as having unnecessary copies of files, whether for backup purposes or accidentally. When dealing with accidental duplicates they can be removed irrespective of the format, and if necessary a shortcut placed in the location of the “ghost” pointing to the still existent file.
As for Backups, it is a very good idea to keep a few copies of current files nearby in case corruption or accidental editing render the main copy unusable. However there does come a point where even if a file is lost that would still be less costly than maintaining all those copies “just in case,” and given that the chance of it being lost is itself fairly small, too many backups are clearly a bad investment. In addition long-term backups really ought to be kept on an external medium rather than the HD, particularly as physical disaster or virus attacks could ruin the entire drive—all local backups included. So when looking for files to remove you have to weigh the cost and benefit yourself of which backup files are actually needed.
In Windows Vista, Disk Cleanup also has the capacity to remove selected System Restore restore points. Consider using that by the same reason as normal backups, but be careful in selecting which old configurations to keep.
Shrink your necessary files
Having combed through the drive to find out what files can be removed completely, you can then look at which files are overly bloated and can be shrunk down to a more reasonable size. This may be achieved through zipping the file, changing the file’s format, or even just taking out the needed information. Very often this process can be set to run on a batch of files, to minimize the time the human must spend working on the task.
It is unwise to change files you did not create yourself but were brought with Windows or other software. It is possible to render such programs inoperable if a file they expect is not there or is of a different name or format. Making Microsoft Word crash for want of a few kilobytes’ clip art would be a pity to say the least. If you do feel that a given set of files is just taking up space and will never be used, try just renaming or moving a few to a different folder. Run the relevant programs, including any features that would use those files, and gauge the results.
Pictures
Bitmap images are horrendously space inefficient. Every single pixel (dot) in the picture requires 3 or even 4 bytes of data. This is theoretically mitigated by perfect accuracy to the original, but wise selection of how to change the bitmap format can result in scarcely any depreciation of quality. Line pictures or those with large sections of single colour (such as is made in graphics editors like Paint) can be saved as GIF, while photographs should be saved as JPEG files. Both can easily reduce the size by 90%, and sometimes even as much as 98%. Advanced users with good software can also adjust palette size or compression ratio (Gif and Jpeg respectively) to find a balance between size and quality. However such particular control inevitably makes batch processing impossible.
Documents
A lot of the information in a document is often unnecessary, and saving under a simpler format will keep only such as is needed. For example if you have a lot of individual Microsoft Word Documents you spend 19KB per document on formatting and header information, with perhaps 2KB on the actual text. Font formatting may sometimes be useful, but at that cost if you have files that could function as well saved under the .txt extension you might want to consider doing so. The same can be said of saving excel spreadsheets as Comma Separated Value files (*.csv) for a similar advantage, though this only saves the data. As always the content of documents are mostly your own creation, but most of the added information is the unnecessary addition of the Office program you’re using.
If you want to keep some formatting but still save on the file size, consider saving word files as a Rich text document (*.rtf) or downloading, installing and using the free Open Office Suite which not only has smaller native file formats but Open Office Writer somehow even succeeds in saving Word documents smaller than Microsoft Word itself. Of course that is not a step to be taken lightly as it means using an unfamiliar office package, but it is an option.
Archives
Finally when looking at shrinking files, one cannot forget about archives. One option is to check the “Compress contents to save disk space” box in the advanced section of a file’s properties. Probably a more efficient method is to use a compression program. These combine a number of files into one (normally a Zip, Rar, or 7Z file) and compress them. The results are variable, based upon settings and the material to be archived. Mpeg, Jpeg, Zip, and other formats that are normally compressed can scarcely be shrunk at all. At most you’d get down to 97% of the starting file size. (Don’t gripe, a Jpeg has after all already come down to between 10% and 2%) By contrast a folder full of Word Documents or a database file can be crammed into a much smaller space. None of these archive programs lose quality from the input files, meaning that once uncompressed again the output is exactly like the input was.
To finish
A few things to do once you have freed all this drive space:
- Run the CCleaner cleaner again, to remove temporary files created during the process.
- Uninstall any of the cleanup programs added for this process that you don’t want to keep.
- Defragment your drive. Though it won’t make any significant difference to the available space, you should do so since all that removal is likely to leave your drive heavily fragmented.
- Check the drive properties in My Computer to see how much has actually been recovered.
- Either smile at yourself, or rush off to buy a bigger hard disk.
Programs that you may want to download to help with this process
- CCleaner: Temporaries
- Jdisk Report: Drive analysis
- WinZip: Compression
- WinRar: Compression
- 7Zip: Compression
- Open Office: aternative Office suite
